Marketing and persuasion are all about communicating. It is the art of selling ideas, generating emotions and creating beliefs in the minds of others. Why do you ask? Well, very simple young grasshopper. A strong idea, a core belief,  a conviction all generate emotions, and emotions are the only things that drive actions. If you want your customer to buy a product, if you want that special someone to go on a date with you, you need to plant a belief in their minds that will generate emotions. These emotions are what will allow them to persuade themselves to perform the action. But marketing is huge and vast and there’s really no way I could ever cover everything in one sitting. So instead I’ll use a little marketing to get you to understand some of the big ideas.

This intro to marketing syllabus will be your guide as you dip your toe into marketing. The resources and content cover some of the most important aspects of marketing that I wish I would I had been taught. This syllabus will be especially beneficial to people coming from a very analytical background like me. The ideas all build on one another and I recommend you check out each section before moving on to the next. I hope you’ll have fun with this syllabus and enjoy learning the concepts.  So grab a hot cup of tea, a comfy blanket and enjoy the journey.

I want you to think of marketing like a magic trick. It looks amazing and unbelievable until you break down how it works. We’re going to break down and guide you through a fundamental trick I call, “the art of inception”. The way we are going to define inception is the art of implanting an idea or belief into a person’s mind with the hopes of generating an emotion that drives action. The art of Inception is a 4-step process and it’s easier to understand if you think of ideas and beliefs as a seed (you know the little things that turn into trees ). With that metaphor in mind, here are the four parts of inception we are going to cover.

Step 1 – Picking your little idea seedlings. Not all ideas or beliefs will actually grow in the soil that is the human mind and you need to learn to pick the ones that will naturally survive and thrive.

So what kinds of idea seeds should you pick? Very simple, pick ideas people will find compelling enough to believe and are sticky enough that they will continue to believe them over time.

A fundamental principle in marketing to remember is that for better or for worse your customers believe things that aren’t true. Or put another way many of the things they believe to be true are true simply because they believe them ( when was the last time you personally double-checked the world is round and not flat ). The contrast between what you know is true and what you perceive is very similar to how optical illusions work. If the human mind believes something it becomes a fact and then we simply look for evidence to support our that belief. With this in mind, our goal then is really only to figure out if people will believe and remember your idea.

Most of your customers have busy lives and live in a noisy world. Before you can ever present your idea to them you first need to capture their attention and that’s very hard to do considering that there is so much competition for it. In this section, we’re going to teach you how to fertilize the soil ( your customer’s mind) so that they actually notice your idea. This is where the science of behavioral economics comes to our rescue.

You see our brains are what researchers call cognitive misers, which means that we try to be as efficient (lazy) as possible when it comes to making decisions especially on what to pay attention to. This is why we trust doctors who tell us to smoke ( authority bias ) or read reviews/testimonials before buying a product ( social proof ). These shortcuts or attempts to be efficient are known as cognitive biases and as marketers, we can use them to make our customers warm up to our ideas and give our idea seeds a fighting chance in their minds (the soil).

With your compelling idea seed in hand and some cognitive biases to fertilize the soil, it’s time to get started on your most important job as a marketer storytelling. Why storytelling ( or story-selling ), because humans aren’t rational. We simply follow our emotions then make up logic afterward to justify them and it’s because of this inconsistency that stories are so important to marketing.

Stories have power over us and are basically the operating system of the entire human brain.  The internal narrative of your customers ( and you ) shape the emotions that they feel and those emotions dictate the actions they are most likely to take. When you sell a story ( instead of your product ) it allows you to bypass all of the brain’s natural defenses because stories themselves are naturally compelling, sticky and give you an opportunity to frame any weapons of influence.

There are a lot of ways to grow a forest, however as with most things in life you have limited time and limited resources so you only really want to consider strategies that take both of those factors into account. However, before we even cover any of that we need to bring to attention an often overlooked fact which is that the trees you plant need to produce delicious fruits. Simply put you want to make sure whatever service or product you’re marketing is actually worth having. A lot of marketing falls apart because the actual product or service sucks so it’s good to double check that your product is awesome ( remember you can’t polish a turd ). With that in mind let’s get started on the on the 2 part strategy you need to focus on as you build your forest ( grow your brand ).

The first step is making sure all of your trees can spread pollen. Your goal here is to make sure your stories are contagious and spread virally so that you are leveraging your customer’s word of mouth instead of your own marketing time or dollars. The ultimate test of the quality of your marketing and your product is whether people voluntarily tell their friends about it.

With that, we’ve given you all the tools to start your journey into marketing. We hope you’ve enjoyed the story we’ve sold you ( the art of inception metaphor )  and our goal is that you found the content both memorable and compelling enough to share with your friends. This syllabus, however, is only the beginning. We recommend that as you move forward in your journey you focus on authentic and vulnerable storytelling, diving deep and understanding emotions and emotional intelligence, paying attention and utilizing the new and rapidly evolving tools to distribute your message, and last but not least always paying attention to where your customers attention actually is at the moment because it’s always changing. We welcome you to the world of marketing and hope to see you again soon.